The Nearest Heart

It is four minutes past three in the morning on the fifth of October, and Juliet is awake. Not that kind of awake in the middle of the night where you will be back asleep shortly. The kind of awake in the middle of the night where you know you're awake in the middle of the night.

She knows the time without looking because she has been lying here long enough to map the dark — the specific quality of the room's silence, the particular angle of the nothing through the east-facing window that means three o'clock rather than two or four. She has been learning this house's dark for years. The hours have their textures. She knows them.

Emmy is perfectly asleep.

The sound of her breathing — measured, even, entirely untroubled — is the room's constant. Juliet lies still and listens to it and takes inventory in the way she takes inventory when something requires honest assessment: starting with what is actually true before arriving at conclusions about what it means.

What is true: Emmy is perfectly asleep. They are in the house that is theirs. Yesterday was Emmy's birthday. Emmy is twenty-three.

What is also true: Juliet is awake because something in her chest will not settle, and it has been arriving this way, in the night, for several weeks now, with increasing frequency and increasing specificity, and she has been filing it in the way she files things that are not yet ready to be examined. But at four minutes past three on a Tuesday in October, with the intimacy of the night still warm in the room and Emmy breathing beside her, the file has apparently decided it is ready.

#

The house at night has sounds she has known since she was a child.

Not frightening sounds — the house is not that kind of house, has never been. It's loyal, but it's also a house. The creak of the upstairs landing under temperature change. The particular note the boiler makes at three in the morning when it is running its cycle. The window in the back room that has a small resonance in certain winds. Julian learned these sounds before he was eight years old, in the particular way that children absorb the language of the houses they are raised in: not consciously, not with effort, simply through proximity over time.

Her father knew them too. He would sometimes say, when a new sound arrived: the house is talking to itself. He had a way of making inanimate things friendly that she has been thinking about more lately. He had a way of introducing a child to their world with the same awe and wonder that he had kept. Awe and wonder that led him, like the titular character of J. M. Barrie's most well known work, to not quite grow up.

Her mother had a different relationship with the house — more practical, more oriented toward function. She had opinions about the kitchen. She reorganized the linen cupboard twice a year with such thoroughness that there was a running family joke about whether she would eventually reorganize the family itself. She was warm in the way of people who express love through attention to what is needed. She cooked something on Sunday mornings that smelled like this specific house and nothing else. Juliet has not been able to reproduce the smell, and she has not tried, because some things are meant to belong to their makers.

They were good parents. She wants to be clear about this, here in the dark where no one is asking and there is no requirement for anything. They were good parents. They loved Julian in the ways they knew how to love him, which were real and specific and his.

They were also — and this is the part that she is approaching now, in the four-past-three dark, for what is probably not the first time but feels like the most honest time — not always paying attention to the same things he was paying attention to. They loved him with the fullness of people who loved many things, who had warmth for the world and opened their door to it and trusted that the world would take care of itself. Julian had learned to notice because someone in the house needed to. He had become the careful one.

She knows what arrived in Julian's chest the year he was thirteen. She has known for a long time. She has carried it with the particular discipline of someone who understands precisely what they are carrying and has decided that the carrying is the correct response until there is a better one. She knows, without the aid of her psychologist wife, that there must be a better one.

It was not only grief. The grief was there, to be sure. But there was more.

She does not say this even in her own mind, not with that word. She gets close and she knows the shape and she has known the shape for ten years, and she has said to herself, in various forms over those ten years, that the shape is the shape of someone who was not well-served by something they depended on, and who therefore felt something complicated when the dependence ended. This is accurate. It is not complete.

The complete version is for Emmy.

She has known this for some time. She has been not-yet-ready for longer. But here, in this specific four-past-three, with Emmy's breathing the room's constant and the birthday weekend still warm and immediate and the question they spoke aloud in September still settling in the house like sediment — she is aware that the not-yet-ready has a duration, and the duration is not infinite, and the end of it is coming.

#

She had been sitting on their bench in the park when she understood this.

October second — her twenty-first birthday, which still has the quality of something she is getting used to — and Emmy had brought her to the park in the late afternoon when the October light was doing the specific October thing to the old trees and the pond and the bench that was theirs before it was theirs, from an evening two years ago Juliet had brought Emmy here, when neither of them knew what was going to happen next.

Emmy had worn the cobalt dress. The one from that evening. She looks stunning in that dress.

Juliet does not have a word for what she feels about this. She does not, she is careful about this, feel ownership. She is alert to the difference between Emmy is mine and Emmy chooses me, and she values the second with the precision that people value things they almost couldn't have. Emmy choosing to wear the dress on Juliet's birthday is not Emmy being possessed. It is Emmy saying something in the language they have. It is Emmy being, in that specific way, a gift.

She had looked at Emmy on the bench in the October light and she had thought: this person sees me. The real me. She has seen me for two years, truthfully longer, and she has not turned away from anything she has seen.

And then, quietly, the other thought: she hasn't seen everything yet.

#

The roast Emmy had made, with spices Juliet had mentioned once, in passing, as something she had wondered about. Emmy had wondered about them for months, apparently, and had made a version for her — only for her, a private version, different from the one she makes for guests, for occasions, for Juliet's in-laws when they visit. A version that was Juliet's alone.

Juliet had understood what this meant. She had eaten it at the kitchen table and she had understood that Emmy Hartwell-Calloway contains a version for the world and a version for the specific person she has chosen to spend her life with, and the version for the specific person is made with what the specific person actually needs rather than what is presentable. And that version reminded Juliet of the distinct smell of her mother's cooking.

She had thought, eating the private roast on her twenty-first birthday: you are doing this too. You are the careful one here and you have a version you carry quietly and you have not given it to me yet. Or her.

She had not said this. She had said this is extraordinary about the roast, and she had meant it on both registers, and Emmy had smiled the smile of someone who knew.

#

The jug.

She had found it in Corrections on the third, when she had gone alone while Emmy checked on Priya and The Bloom. The homegoods section near the front window, where she had picked it up in May and held it and said we don't need this and put it back.

She had held it again on the third of October and she had known what it was for.

She had been developing the cream for two months — a specific thing, flavored precisely, designed to sit in the ceramic jug on the kitchen counter and to enhance Emmy's morning coffee in the way that Emmy might enjoy. Take Juliet's base and customize to her liking by varying the amount. A way of saying: I have been paying attention to what you love and I have found something to add to it, and you can choose how much you want.

Emmy had held the jug on the morning of the fourth, in the October birthday light, and Juliet had watched her face as she worked out what it was for.

Sometimes, Emmy had said, not quite finishing the thought, just holding the jug and looking at Juliet.

Sometimes, Juliet had agreed. She knew what Emmy hadn't finished. She was finishing it in her own chest, where it sat alongside the thing in the waiting area and the knowledge that the two things are connected in a way that she has not yet been able to say aloud.

Sometimes it is possible to enhance an already good thing.

#

Emmy makes a small sound in her perfect sleep. Not words — something softer, an exhalation that is close to a sigh, that has the quality of someone moving through something good.

Juliet turns her head to look at her.

In the dark, Emmy's face has the quality Juliet has been trying to describe to herself for two years — the particular way Emmy is completely, unguardedly herself when she is not performing anything, when she is simply existing without an audience. The face that looks out from the bench in October light. The face that manages the clinical hours with care. The face that laughed too long at an innocent comment about bodies changing, in a fitting room in May.

She has not seen everything.

Juliet is going to give it to her. She is going to give her the waiting area and the thing it contains and the name she has never said out loud. She is going to do this because Emmy is twenty-three years old and she asked would we? in September with the whole of herself, and she has been waiting — not pressing, not forcing, simply waiting with the particular quality of someone who knows how to wait — and the waiting has a cost that Juliet can see even when Emmy is very good at not showing it. Emmy is perfect, but Juliet is not. Work still needs to be done before she can unlock the door for Emmy, and that work will still take some time.

The roast has a private version. So does Juliet.

She reaches across in the dark and presses her lips, very gently, to Emmy's shoulder. Not to wake her. Just to locate herself — here, in this room, with this person, on the other side of something that is getting closer.

Emmy does not wake. She makes another small sound, something like settling.

Juliet lies back and looks at the east-facing window.

The dark is the specific dark of four-past-three. She has inventory left to take, and it still will take time. She is, for the first time in a long time, however, not afraid of the taking.

* * *